Why History?

In 1976 I arrived from my country grammar school at the Historical shrine of Peterhouse. At the time, although the smallest of the colleges of Cambridge, it had the highest number of History dons.

The study of History was taken seriously and the effect on me was to be lifelong. The key people for me were Maurice Cowling and Brian Wormald. Sitting in front of these strange, intense men reading an undergraduate essay was profoundly challenging. Historical writing involved seeking to understand the reality behind why men acted in the way they did; and that reality was hugely complex and not to be confused with the descriptions of it in the work of historians. For those writing about the past always have an agenda. The identification and evaluation of that agenda is part of the reader’s challenge. The effort to abandon – or at least admit to – that agenda is part of the historian’s challenge.

The Sainsbury Centre at UEA

My daughter and I made our first trip to the Sainsbury Centre to see the Giacometti show. It’s a neat little exhibition; not enough Giacometti to be exciting, but enough to make the journey from London worthwhile. I enjoyed the subtlety of the themes being developed around other artists, although there was the very slight feeling that the curators had decided that because the Sainsbury collection contains things by Bacon etc they might as well see if they could weave some of them in.

It was fascinating to see 3 works by Isabelle Rawsthorne. Her work almost never comes up in London auctions and I thought at least 2 of the pictures were very good.

It was also, of course, a great pleasure to see Freud’s drawing of Peter Watson which lives in the V and A. Watson knew Giacometti and was painted by him. The portrait is now in MOMA.

Giacometti is a “hard” artist, both to describe and to understand. The more clever shows we can have like this, the better. The one at the NPG was similarly insightful.

What a very strange place to have a gallery: in the middle of the bizarre goings-on one reads about at UEA, their students banning strangely chosen things. The juxtaposition with the horrible university buildings is not beneficial to the gallery, which could otherwise be on a beautiful country estate somewhere, like Compton Verney. Still, that isn’t going to change now. One wonders how many students visit the gallery.

Posted Monday, May 23rd, 2016, filed under: Peter Watson

Prunella Clough and John Piper at the Jerwood Gallery

The Jerwood Gallery in Hastings is rapidly becoming one of our favourite places to go.They are on a roll, with super little focussed shows, intelligently making use of their relatively small space to best effect.

Prunella Clough’s early work is fascinating; her later work of no interest whatsoever. I don’t know what happened to her. It all looked so promising and all went so wrong. In the late 1940s/early 50s she was part of a wave of young artists breathing life into representation. She faced the usual issues of saying something new using traditional methods and she achieved something. She should really have pushed on from her workmen and lorries and ladders and become an important British artist of the second half of the century. In fact she didn’t. I don’t know what her auction record is but it will be relatively low and none of the later abstract works that I have seen are likely to elevate her market status at all.

It is very cruel setting her up to be compared to the Titanic qualities of the wonderful John Piper. I think he has a good claim to be one of the greatest British artists of the 20th C. I love his work and admire his amazing fluidity in so many forms and media. This is yet another demonstration of his great quality.

So go to the Jerwood; join as a member; see these smart little shows and enjoy lovely Hastings.

 

Posted Saturday, April 23rd, 2016, filed under: Jerwood Gallery, John Piper, Prunella Clough

Kenneth Rowntree at Croft Castle

We visited Croft Castle, a National Trust property in Herefordshire, on our way to Shropshire. There are three oils by Rowntree on display, two of them paintings of the castle itself. (One is said to be on loan). The usual lovely Rowntree work.

I imagine the 2nd Lord Croft, who died in 1997, had something to do with the pictures being painted.

Posted Tuesday, April 12th, 2016, filed under: Kenneth Rowntree

Patrick Hennessy and Gerard Dillon

Good news from Ireland. At last one can see what has every sign of being a proper retrospective of the peculiar work of Patrick Hennessy, opening shortly.Long the partner of Harry Robertson Craig, and friendly with Colquhoun and Macbryde, he worked in a super-realist style. I am not sure where such a style derived from, (Hennessy was Irish but went to art school in Dundee), although when one thinks of the work of Tristram Hillier, Edward McGuire or Algernon Newton, for example, it suggests these artists got their inspiration from somewhere not that obscure. Perhaps the show and its catalogue will elucidate that. It is always an important antidote to one of the mantras of art history to identify lines of 20th C artists who did not follow any of the occasionally false trails set by Picasso (Robert Colquhoun being a good contrast to his friend Hennessy in this regard, as he caught the Picasso bug quite badly). All credit to the lovely gallery at the Irish Museum of Modern Art ( IMMA) in Kilmainham for putting on a serious subject like this. I will have to sort out a visit and an excuse to revisit one of my favourite hotels, the Merrion.

Equally welcome is news of a Gerard Dillon show in Belfast at a gallery unknown to me in the Falls Road. This one I probably will not have time to visit but again it is good to see that it is on.

Posted Thursday, March 17th, 2016, filed under: 20th century British art, Algernon Newton, Gerard Dillon, IMMA, Irish Art, Patrick Hennessy, Tristram Hillier

Karel Appel, Bosch and Delacroix

Not natural bedfellows, but they happen to be the subject of three exhibitions I have visited over the past few days.

The Appel show is large and highly revealing for an English visitor. I don’t imagine there is much work by him on display in the UK and I only really know his work through illustrations (such as the peculiar portrait of Herbert Read, which is on the cover of a book I think). As a whole, this retrospective at the Gemeentemuseum in Den Haag (which resembles a converted municipal building somehow, with coloured encaustic tiles everywhere and odd corridors) was excellent. His work was full of variety and a number of pictures have stuck in my mind despite the overlay of the other two artists coming afterwards. I fear he knocks aside our very own COBRA member, William Gear, whose work I do like but which seems infinitely dreary and repetitive compared with this. Gear rather went down in my estimation after I saw him en masse at Eastbourne (in the same way, I have never been able to look at Camille Pissarro’s work in the same way after seeing multiple almost identical examples in a retrospective many years ago). So, if you are going to the Netherlands to see the Bosch, as advised by the reviews in many of the English papers, go to Den Haag, stay at the lovely Hotel des Indes, glance at the Escher museum, visit the wonderful Mauritshuis and see Appel. Tramline 17 gets you there from the centre. There are also many works by Mondrian to see.

A proper train will then drag you through the grey Dutch February countryside to Den Bosch, changing easily at Utrecht; a journey which takes just over an hour. On arrival, one finds the little, and I suspect otherwise rarely-visited by tourists, town of Den Bosch en fete. They are very excited about their boy and his big show, and they are right to be proud. There is a nice walk through the town to the Noord Brabants Museum, where the show is being held, and on the way Bosch things are everywhere to be seen by way of advertisement and encouragement. We had bought tickets online and everything worked smoothly.

What a great treat it is. All those pictures one feels as if one has grown up with. I had seen the batch in the Prado, but seeing picture after picture together is breathtaking. Completely new to me were the drawings. Definitely worth a visit, especially if combined with something else in the gloriously rich culture of the Netherlands, where everywhere appears to be readily accessible by train. (The lover of things German could always go to Huis Doorn to see where the last Kaiser spent his last years after leaving Germany at the end of the First World War. He was still there when the German army arrived to occupy the Netherlands in 1940, but he seems to have overestimated their enthusiasm to restore him to his throne.)

The Delacroix show at the National Gallery is very hard to get excited about. One feels the curators have enjoyed themselves discovering connections between him and later artists, thereby padding out the works on display by Delacroix with works by others. I went round as part of a guided tour of about 30 people and I would guess, as non-art historians, every one of them was utterly bewildered as to the point of the show and the reality of the connections being claimed. The thesis was far too academic and obscure for a big show of general appeal and one rather longed to emerge from the dark little exhibition rooms in the grim basement of the Sainsbury Wing and get back to the real glories of the National Gallery’s great collection upstairs. I wonder if the newish Director inherited this show from the previous Director? One just needed to be shown why Delacroix himself was so important, without getting onto whether Renoir was influenced by him. I suggest Delacroix on his own needs selling to normal English art-loving visitors before one starts to complicate the message.

Posted Wednesday, February 24th, 2016, filed under: William Gear

John Bratby at the Jerwood Gallery

Down to Hastings to see Bratby at the Jerwood. I have seen a lot of his pictures through the salerooms over the years, but of course one gets a patchy impression like that. At Hastings there are enough pictures to give one more of an overview, although the arrangment isn’t obviously logical in a chronological sense. Also, the Gallery clearly had more pictures to show than it knew what to do with in the available space. Odd pictures lurk in corridors round corners, as well as being scattered across the whole of the ground floor gallery space.

The result is, I think, a great success. Bratby, like so many other British artists of the 20th C, and perhaps every century, was personally clearly a difficult man and there are hints of his high self-regard. He also ended up towards the end of his career  with a style of picture involving his second wife, Patti, indulging in, how shall one put it, immodest poses. These are not attractive pictures; they are if anything revolting. The exhibition, I assume tongue in cheek, even incorporates the actual red coat which Patti wore in some of the pictures.  But strip those pictures aside and Bratby’s work is full of interest and fascination.

Bratby was praised by his teacher, Carel Weight. I didn’t notice any catalogue in the exhibition (apologies if there was one), so I didn’t get a lot of guidance as to what the curator thought were the artists who had influenced him. I don’t see any Weight there; van Gogh is more obvious, even to the extent of Bratby trying his hand at sunflowers. But technical brilliance is what one takes away from this show. He was clearly an astonishing manipulator of colour and the result is a show of tremendous energy and skill. I loved it.

Posted Monday, February 8th, 2016, filed under: 20th century British art, Jerwood Gallery, John Bratby

Basil Blackshaw

Caught a BBC documentary on Iplayer about him. I assumed he had died, but apparently not. Interviews with him show him as an old man in rather desperate need of a haircut.

His work is varied and sometimes highly impressive. He is a country artist/man, with many pictures of the dogs and horses he has been surrounded with in Northern Ireland. But that sounds too limiting; he has become more adventurous as he has got older. The show featured for example a series of works of windows, which a number of the commentators liked.

It is always good for the English audience to get a glimpse of the artistic riches which have come out of NI. Blackshaw is but the latest of a long line of significant 20th C painters and sculptors, such as Gerard Dillon, George Campbell, FE McWilliam,  Arthur Armstrong, Colin Middleton, Daniel O’Neil, Norah McGuinness, Sine Mackinnon and so on. One could even include Wiliam Scott, whose family came from Enniskillen, where the painter returned to from Scotland as a boy.

Posted Monday, January 18th, 2016, filed under: 20th century British art, Basil Blackshaw, Northern Irish artists

Miro at Galerie Gmurzynska in Zurich

The gallery has sent me the most splendid hardback catalogue of their current Miro show. Thank you very much! My connection with them came a while ago when they asked me to write something on Wifredo Lam’s reception in the UK. I knew a certain amount about that from my Watson research as Watson was supportive of the Cuban Lam.

Posted Tuesday, January 5th, 2016, filed under: Peter Watson, Wifredo Lam

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